Author: Tetman Callis

“Researchers ask parents if they’re happy, but that’s the wrong question; it’s like asking a cow if it can fly. Evidently there’s something we prize above happiness, and that’s a good story, especially if it stars us.” – David Kirby (quoted in Rattle 64)

“Poetry is that ocean of fire I step into every time I’m desperate for some logic. It’s obviously hopeless. But for those moments when it seems to almost work, I keep on trying.” Maya Tevet Dayan (quoted in Rattle 66)

“The blood clot is doing // its job, / it’s doing exactly what // it was made to do / and the only thing you // need to do / when you are dying // is to die. / Nothing else. // You don’t need to / fold the laundry // or clean / the kitchen floor, // you don’t have to / pick your children up // from school. / Unlike // the rest of your life, / there is only this one // thing. You don’t even // have to be good at it, // you just have to / do it. A list of chores // with just one / chore.” – Matthew Dickman, “Stroke”

“If I were in your bedroom, would you pick me up and say, Oh my god you’re so light I could throw you across the room? Like a toy you want to break? Because you wouldn’t be the first. Would you do it? Throw me? Does that turn you on? Do you know what it’s like to be in bed with someone you’re also afraid of? Do you know what it’s like to walk home in the dark and wish you could grow claws?” – Arielle Moss, “Damn, You’re Tiny” (emphasis in original)

From the Sanskrit, there comes this: ‘Vinasa kale vibareetha pudthi’ which means, ‘When the time for your destruction is at hand you take strange decisions.’ (courtesy Abraham Sukumar at Quora)

“Have you ever met a god? It’s like this. They just can’t help themselves. They’re very sorry, the gods, but they are going to fuck you up. Like the child-eating goddess who would very much like to but just cannot, cannot stop herself from guzzling your little daughter.” – Adam Thirlwell, “Slow Motion”

“When we went to the district-commandant to enlist, we were a class of twenty young men, many of whom proudly shaved for the first time before going to the barracks. We had no definite plans for our future. Our thoughts of a career and occupation were as yet of too unpractical a character to furnish any scheme of life. We were still crammed full of vague ideas which gave to life, and to the war also an ideal and almost romantic character. We were trained in the army for ten weeks and in this time more profoundly influenced than by ten years at school. We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer. At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognised that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill. We became soldiers with eagerness and enthusiasm, but they have done everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided postman should have more authority over us than had formerly our parents, our teachers, and the whole gamut of culture from Plato to Goethe. With our young, awakened eyes we saw that the classical conception of the Fatherland held by our teachers resolved itself here into a renunciation of personality such as one would not ask of the meanest servants—salutes, springing to attention, parade-marches, presenting arms, right wheel, left wheel, clicking the heels, insults, and a thousand pettifogging details. We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies. But we soon accustomed ourselves to it. We learned in fact that some of these things were necessary, but the rest merely show. Soldiers have a fine nose for such distinctions.” – Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (trans. Wheen)

“Laws must look to possibilities, if the maker designs to punish few in order to their amendment, and not many to no purpose.” – “Solon,” Plutarch’s Lives (trans. A. H. Clough)

“It can sometimes happen that, when confronted by what seems to be a wall, which one cannot get either through or round, a kind of radical reorientation is called for. Turning the whole thing over so that an approach can be made from the opposite side, as it were. If this is to succeed, it nearly always means relinquishing some cherished notion or something that you have relied on. This destructive side to creative life is essential to an artist’s survival.” – Bridget Riley, “At the End of My Pencil”

“To be excited by the prospect of a great adventure is one thing, to act is another.” – Bridget Riley, “At the End of My Pencil”

“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“The writers from the provinces are usually rescued from their dream of becoming writers, a terrible dream, difficult to abandon, when their parents die in the provinces and leave them an apartment or a small factory or, in the worst case, a widow and a few mouths to feed, and the writer from the provinces must return to his province, where invariably he ends up establishing a literary workshop; there, he preaches the goodness of the capital and convinces his students that there, in the capital, something really happens, and sooner rather than later, the students end up leaving for the capital, and so the whole cycle repeats itself, like the life cycle of frogs.” – Patricio Pron, “A Few Words on the Life Cycle of Frogs” (trans. Janet Hendrickson)

“I no longer wanted to write; in fact, I didn’t even try. It was like I knew I’d wasted time at the station and the train had passed, and now I had to walk to the fucking end of the world, to arrive there with my feet destroyed and discover that everyone else had left a while back and they’d left the bill on the table without paying and a few dirty plates that I’d have to wash in the kitchen to cancel the bill.” – Patricio Pron, “A Few Words on the Life Cycle of Frogs” (trans. Janet Hendrickson)

“This system is a fucking circle of doom. Produce more and more cheaply, and make the consumer swallow faster and faster. And the key to keeping the goddamn assembly line moving, you know what it is? That nothing that’s consumed is real; what’s real is expensive, and gets consumed slowly. That’s why the ultimate solution is: nothing can be real. None of the food or the clothes or the music or the books or the drugs are real. It seems like food, like clothes, like music, but it’s all just something like those things, made to be devoured immediately. It’s a perfect system. A magnificent, gigantic, super-efficient piece of machinery that produces nothing, totally and absolutely nothing.” – Andrés Ressia Colino, “Scenes from a Comfortable Life” (trans. Katherine Silver)

“I like buying new technology because it takes me quite a long time to realize it is pointless. I read the instructions, hit the keys, connect a cable here and another there, and feel as if I’m confronting a huge mystery I have to solve. And I enjoy it. Then there is no mystery, only a useless gadget I jettison in any old drawer.” – Alberto Olmos, “Eva and Diego” (trans. Peter Bush)

“Spending is about the fear of dying. Everything I’ve ever bought is a bet I place that I’ll keep on living. . . . We buy because we want to be here for a lot longer, because what we acquire needs us alive. Things make claims on us. The meaning of life is simply that everything we buy is meaningless if we are dead. Spending implies a future.” – Alberto Olmos, “Eva and Diego” (trans. Peter Bush)

“I have no qualifications in the career or, rather, pursuit I chose for my journey through life, and I’ve long ceased to think of it in those terms, although I suppose I got off to a pretty good start. In the end, though, I lost sight of my fellow runners, the ones you’re so conscience of at first, when you’re in your twenties or thirties and keep glancing out of the corner of your eye at those behind, intent (or so you believe) on overtaking you, meanwhile calculating how big a lead the runners ahead have over you and conserving your energies as you imagine the best way of getting past them for the final sprint. But there are no sprints, and certainly no final sprints. Indeed, I stopped running a long time ago. There’s no point. Just walk at the pace that suits your feet and you’ll end up arriving at the place you set out for. Or else keep quite still: lately, I’ve had the feeling that it’s simply a matter of sitting and waiting, that it isn’t us who do the walking, but the things around us, and they won’t fail us; they never do, because nothing ever fails and everything ends up happening anyway.” – Javier Montes, “The Hotel Life” (trans. Margaret Jull Costa)

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.” – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“What a proletarian organ, the ass, the organ you sit on, and even though it seems to work and have working-class awareness, it’s really just waiting to die.” – Pola Oloixarac, “Conditions for the Revolution” (trans. Mara Faye Lethem)

“is it hard to be you? is it nice to be you? how does it feel to be you?” – Rodrigo Hasbún, “The Place of Losses” (trans. Carolina de Robertis)

“You are a light. You are the light. Never let anyone—any person or any force—dampen, dim or diminish your light. Study the path of others to make your way easier and more abundant. Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates. Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release all bitterness. Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won. Choose confrontation wisely, but when it is your time don’t be afraid to stand up, speak up, and speak out against injustice. And if you follow your truth down the road to peace and the affirmation of love, if you shine like a beacon for all to see, then the poetry of all the great dreamers and philosophers is yours to manifest in a nation, a world community, and a Beloved Community that is finally at peace with itself.” – John Lewis, Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America

“She had never had to deal with a policeman in her life, and it had never entered her mind to feel menaced by one. Policemen were neither friends nor enemies; they were part of the landscape, present for the purpose of upholding law and order; and if a policeman—for she had never thought of them as being very bright—seemed to forget his place, it was easy enough to make him remember it. Easy enough if one’s own place was more secure than his, and if one represented, or could bring to bear, a power greater than his own. For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless.” – James Baldwin, Another Country

“Don’t fear the dog that barks, but fear the dog that’s quiet.” – Anton Chekhov, “The Chattel” (trans. Constance Garnett)

“When women feel that they are in the right, they scold and shed tears; when they are conscious of being in fault, they shed tears only.” – Anton Chekhov, “The Chattel” (trans. Constance Garnett)

“It is futile to fight with the state. If it wants to put you in prison, you may be sure that it will put you there.” – Andrey Konstantinov, “In the Law and Outside the Law. From His Cell in Manhattan, Ivankov Continues To Direct His Empire”

“The judge, even when he is free, is still not wholly free. He is not to innovate at pleasure. He is not a knighterrant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness. He is to draw his inspiration from consecrated principles. He is not to yield to spasmodic sentiment, to vague and unregulated benevolence. He is to exercise a discretion informed by tradition, methodized by analogy, disciplined by system, and subordinated to the primordial necessity of order in the social life. Wide enough in all conscience is the field of discretion that remains.” – Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process

“The common law is but the accumulated expressions of the various judicial tribunals in their efforts to ascertain what is right and just between individuals in respect to private disputes. The common law, however, is not static. By its nature, it adapts to changing circumstances. The common law is affected by the felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, and intuitions of public policy, and it embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries. It is generally agreed that two of the most significant features of the common law are: (1) its capacity for growth and (2) its capacity to reflect the public policy of a given era. The common law does not consist of definite rules which are absolute, fixed, and immutable like the statute law, but it is a flexible body of principles which are designed to meet, and are susceptible of adaption to, among other things, new institutions, public policies, conditions, usages and practices, and changes in mores, trade, commerce, inventions, and increasing knowledge, as the progress of society may require. So, changing conditions may give rise to new rights under the law. The common law is always a work in progress and typically develops incrementally, i.e., gradually evolving as individual disputes are decided and existing common-law rules are considered and sometimes adapted to current needs in light of changing times and circumstances.” – Chief Justice Robert P. Young, Jr., Michigan Supreme Court, Price v. High Pointe Oil Co., 2013 (edited for clarity; internal cites and quotes omitted)

“French logic is very simple. Whatever the French do is logical because the French are doing it.” – James Baldwin, Another Country

“The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he must encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish. The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.” – James Baldwin, Another Country (emphasis in original)

“Strangers’ faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.” – James Baldwin, Another Country